I spent two months thinking about pricing before I let myself write the pricing page.
That is not a humblebrag, it slowed everything down. The product was technically ready in March. By April it could have been on sale. But every time I sat down to define the free tier, something did not sit right, and I would close the tab and go fix a bug instead.
What unstuck it was not a framework, a benchmark, or a YC essay. It was one question I could not answer to my own satisfaction. I want to write about it, because the question is generalizable and I think a lot of solo makers building tools quietly trip over it.
A bit of context first. I have been a technical product manager at large tech companies for many years, always on B2B SaaS, always with a team, always for someone else's company. The product I was pricing is Notch, a screen recorder for Mac and Windows. It is the first desktop app I have shipped under my own name. So this was the first time I was personally on the line for a pricing decision, with my own money funding the development and my own name on the receiver.
The freemium playbook I almost ran
When I sketched the pricing card the first time, it looked almost exactly like what every other screen recorder does:
- Free tier with a 5-project cap, limited by 1080p output quality, and a watermark on exports
- Paid tier at $49 one-time that removes both
This is the freemium playbook by default. The free tier is a trial in disguise. Generous enough to demo the product, restrictive enough that anyone using it seriously has to upgrade. Loom does it. Screen Studio does it. Camtasia does it. Tella does it. So did the spreadsheet I was modelling.
The numbers added up. The conversion funnel made sense. I built the watermark into the export pipeline. I implemented the project counter and a "you've hit your limit" modal. I tested both. They worked.
I just did not want to ship them.
The question I could not answer
The discomfort was not moral. I had convinced myself the freemium model is honest enough, since the limits are visible upfront. The discomfort was about a specific user I kept picturing.
That user is someone like me five or ten years ago: an engineer recording their first screencast tutorial for their blog, a student doing a class project, a hobbyist showing their indie game on Mastodon. Someone who is not going to make a dollar from the thing they are recording. Someone for whom $49, even one-time, is meaningful money.
Why am I asking them to pay?
I sat with that question for two weeks. Every answer felt thin.
"Because the software costs me money to maintain."
OK, true, but that user is not loading my support queue. They are not going to email me. They are using the product silently.
"Because if I let them export for free, they will never upgrade."
They were never going to upgrade. They do not have a use case for the Commercial license, they are not running paid work through it. The "upgrade" framing is a trick I would be playing on someone who could not fall for it.
"Because it is the standard model in the category."
The least convincing answer of all. "Everyone does it" has never been a strong reason to do anything.
The honest version of the question kept reformulating itself in my head:
Why should someone pay me if they are not making money from this themselves?
I did not have a good answer. So I stopped trying to find one.
What I changed
I removed the project cap. I removed the watermark. I removed all limits. The personal tier of Notch is fully free. No degraded export, no nag screens, no asterisks. You install the app, you hit record, you export your video. Done.
The Commercial license is still there. It is $49 one-time, with team pricing for 3 and 10 seats. The split is not "free for limited use, paid for everything". It is "free for personal use, paid for revenue-generating use". The line is the purpose of the recording, not the feature set.
This means:
- A student making a class project: free, forever, with full features.
- A bootcamp graduate recording tutorials for their portfolio: free.
- An OSS maintainer recording a feature demo for a GitHub issue: free.
- A teacher recording an async lesson for their students: free.
- A consultant making client deliverables: Commercial license.
- A SaaS team recording onboarding videos: Commercial license.
- A YouTuber monetizing their channel: Commercial license.
The free tier and the Commercial tier are the same software. The license is what changes.
The objection I expected
I had a draft of this post that opened with the predictable objection: "But how will you actually make money?"
I cut it because I think it deserves a real answer, not a defensive setup. Here is the real answer.
Most non-monetizing users were never going to pay anyway. Walking into a freemium model assuming they are conversion-able is wishful. The honest math: if 95% of free-tier users would never pay regardless of how much you crippled the free tier, your "free tier" was effectively gifting them a worse product than they could have had, and resenting them for not converting.
Commercial users are different. They have a budget line for tools. They are comparing me to Loom at $18/user/month or Screen Studio at $108/year. A one-time $49, or $29/user for a 10-pack, is the cheapest thing in their procurement queue. They are going to pay.
Goodwill compounds. The student who got Notch for free for a year, who graduates and goes to a SaaS company that needs internal training videos, that is the person who pitches Notch to their boss. Not because of switching costs, but because they already know it works and trust it. That kind of advocacy does not show up in a conversion funnel, is almost impossible to A/B test, and stacks over years.
The "real free tier" is a marketing position. It is also a moat. Every competitor who runs the freemium-with-limits playbook is implicitly telling their non-monetizing users "we tolerate you, for now". That is not a feeling people seek out.
The deeper reason
I will be honest about the part that is not a pricing argument.
I went into product management years ago because I love watching the results of my work get used. Not "purchased". Used. The thing I find satisfying about shipping is people getting value. If I could only sell products and never see them in someone's hands, I would have stayed in e-commerce.
Building "another commercial product", one more entry in a category, optimized for revenue capture, was not a strong enough reason for me to spend a year of my evenings on something. It is a thing I could have done with my day job's time instead. The reason I built Notch is that I kept wanting it to exist and nothing else delivered it. The reason I am shipping it is that I want other people to have it too.
A pricing model that restricts the people most likely to enjoy the product, in order to maximize revenue from the people also most likely to enjoy the product, is solving for the wrong thing.
The team and Commercial side will pay for itself. I would rather underearn from the model I chose than overcharge through one that fights my own reason for building.
What I'd tell another maker
Three things, briefly.
Pricing reveals what you actually think your product is for. If the only way the math works is by limiting the people who would love your product most, the math might be wrong.
The freemium playbook is the default, not the answer. It works for some categories, usually ones with high marginal cost per user, strong network effects, or genuine paid value the free tier cannot replicate. Most maker tools are none of those.
Trust your discomfort. I spent two months avoiding writing a pricing page because the model I was about to ship felt wrong. That feeling was data. I should have listened to it sooner.
If you are curious what the product looks like with this pricing applied: Notch is on Mac and Windows, fully free for personal use, no account, no cloud, no nags. Commercial license is one-time, $49.
I am happy to argue any of the above in the comments. I think I am right, but I have been wrong about pricing for a living.
May the force be with you.
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